Syracuse, N.Y. -- Three men who heard a woman call for help after her purse was stolen tracked down the suspect and held him until police arrived, a report says.

A police report provided the following account:

Kristine Ambriati, a 46-year-old secretary, was working in a back room at Amtek Home Remodeling at 380 Sixth North St. in Syracuse when she heard what she thought was the front screen door click and walked over to see who it was.

It was just after 9:30 a.m. on June 28, a Saturday.

She saw a man she didn't recognize walking near the dumpsters outside her place of work. When she approached him, she saw that his sweatshirt had a bulge, she told police. She said that she grabbed at it, and out came her purse, a Michael Kors black bag with gold chain straps.

She looked through it and noticed that her wallet with her credit cards was missing. She told the man to give her the wallet back, then noticed it had fallen to the ground.

Ambriati told police that she made the man pick up the wallet and then told him to hand it to her.

That's when he ran east toward Wolf Street, she told police. Ambriati screamed for help.

Three men came to her aid. When she told them what happened, two of them, 50-year-old Marcelino Molina and 30-year-old Anthony Colabufo, ran after the man. Another, Jeffrey Cook, 56, jumped in his Dodge pick-up truck and followed.

Molina stopped the suspect at some point, but he got back up and kept running. When the police officer who wrote the incident report arrived, Molina flagged him down, with the suspect's gray sweatshirt in hand, on Lemoyne Avenue near Seventh North Street.

Cook pulled up in his pickup truck and told the officer, "They got the guy down there," pointing toward Wolf Street.

By then, Colabufo had detained the suspect until another officer arrived and placed him in the back of a police car.